


Luminosity

by bethagain



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: / or & you choose the goggles, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Hypothermia, I've done got my tropes all mixed up here, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Sharing a Bed, and sort of, but this one's rated G, if there's anything else going on here that's up to you, is apparently also a relevant tag, it started out playing with the only one bed thing, oh and, veered into, which also stands for gentle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 11:48:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19272664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethagain/pseuds/bethagain
Summary: A quick trip to bless someone with a miracle takes a wrong turn, and Aziraphale and Crowley are stuck overnight in rural Iceland. The northern lights are beautiful, but it turns out demons, cold-blooded, tend to seize up when it's freezing out. Aziraphale finds a way to get him warm again.





	Luminosity

**Author's Note:**

> So was chatting with some writer friends, and the topic of fanfic tropes came up. I expressed some bewilderment as to the popularity of certain plotlines, such as the scads of "only one bed" stories. As a mostly genfic reader/writer, I'm not sure I've ever actually read one. It wouldn't occur to me to seek them out.
> 
> But then I thought, gosh, people sure do love those, though. 
> 
> I wonder if I could write one?
> 
> Since I had Good Omens on the brain, having just watched the lovely TV series and then immediately picked up the book, of course it ended up being Aziraphale and Crowley. And, since I'm me, of course by the time I was done the story involved Iceland, herring, and the aurora borealis, and the whole "only one bed" thing turned out not to be the main point of it after all. 
> 
> Although there is, indeed, only one bed.

It was not, in fact, a dark and stormy night.

It was a clear night and a cold one. The ground beneath their feet crunched with frost. Curtains of green light shimmered above the horizon.

Aziraphale, tromping along a deserted road in northern Iceland, was a pale shadow. Crowley, trudging beside him, was a dark one.

Angels don’t get cold, exactly, even when wearing bodies that look human. Demons, on the other hand, are always a little chilly. It was God’s amusement to have them cast out into the fiery pit, and at the same time to leave them permanently at the edge of shivering. 

On a normal day, if a human happened to touch Crowley’s skin it wouldn’t feel cold, unless he chose to make it that way for a lark. But inside, his fingers always ached just a bit. The tip of his nose was perpetually, if very slightly, numb. His feet were constantly chilled, even when he doubled up on the very fine wool socks that a shop owner in London had cheerily handed him, before blithely watching him walk away without paying.1

So Crowley was not enjoying being out in this -4° weather. It made him feel laggy, too. His arms and legs were heavy and his thoughts were a little thick. He wasn’t interested in admitting it, though, not while Aziraphale was gawking, wide-eyed and buoyant, at the aurora borealis dancing above their heads.

“What a fortuitous mistake!” Aziraphale said, watching delightedly as a circle of green light on the horizon flowed out into a stream across the sky, swelled into a river, and then widened to a torrent of bright flashes that roiled their way back down the firmament before sliding back down past the edge of the earth.

“Fortuitous,” nodded Crowley. They were stuck in rural Iceland, miles from the nearest town. He didn’t think it was remotely fortuitous.

The sky faded into a pale green shimmer. Aziraphale flashed a sheepish glance at Crowley before turning his eyes to the road. “I should have taken better notes,” he conceded. “There’s a herring boat captain at Haugesund who really does deserve his miracle, after what he did to save his crew during that storm. I suppose,” he added hopefully, “if you don’t know a reward is coming, you won’t know if it’s late?”

The problem Aziraphale was facing was this: He and Crowley were in Iceland.

Haugesund, however, is not in Iceland. 

Haugesund in the mid 1800s, which is the time frame in which we are currently watching Crowley and Aziraphale, was a small but mighty center of the Norwegian herring industry. Norwegian, as in Norway. Norway, as in where Aziraphale was supposed to have gone. Each day thousands of small, silvery fish passed through the streets of Haugesund and onward to the world. If Aziraphale had actually gone to Haugesund, he would have been captivated with the bustle of wooden boats coming in and out of the docks. 

He would have been less impressed, however, with the smell. 

So in that regard, it was indeed fortuitous for Aziraphale that when the Heavenly Voice boomed into his London bookshop of that era, he had just opened up a first edition of _Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus_. This was a book so frowned upon by the Forces of Heaven, who didn’t like the implication that Creation was something any old bloke could do, that the angel had only now worked up the courage to read it. 

In the process of slamming the book shut and whisking it underneath the table where, he hoped, the All-Seeing wouldn’t be able to see it, he’d knocked over his tea.

And in the resulting scramble to protect the book, sop up the tea, and write down the location of the valiant herring-boat captain, Haugesund had turned into _Haugscribble_.

So, again. Hauge _sund_ is a city in Norway. A city which in the mid 1800s had a bustling herring industry and some fairly decent places to get dinner. Hau _ganes_ is a village in the far north of Iceland that, today, consists of a handful of houses, about 100 people, and often some whales hanging out offshore. In the mid 1800s it was barely a dot on the coastline.

Hauganes is about halfway down the coast of a lovely fjord that cuts deep into the northern shoreline. On the way from the larger town of Dalvik, Crowley and Aziraphale, riding in a cart driven by a local fisherman who had no idea he’d picked up a couple of immortal and inscrutable passengers, had passed through snow-covered plains backed by craggy, snow-covered mountains. They may have even seen a whale or two out in the fjord.

But now, the cart and horses had been put away, the fisherman had gone home to bed, and Aziraphale had discovered, to his embarrassment, that there had been nothing but calm weather here recently. While the handful of fisherman in Hauganes were certainly all valiant in their own ways, there was no one who had heroically saved his crew from a watery grave.

He pulled the scrap of paper from his waistcoat pocket and looked at his scribble more closely. That was, in fact, an E after the G there, wasn’t it. Not an A. He’d got the N right but missed the U and the S. And the letter at the end? It was smudged and misshapen, but it was definitely a D.

They could have woken the cart driver back up again. But Aziraphale didn’t want to, and Crowley didn’t have the heart (or whatever demons have in place of a heart) to make him.

So, now, with the sun gone down, the moon below the horizon, and the road empty except for one angel and one demon about two hours into an 8 mile hike back toward Dalvik, the main thing to see was the lights overhead. The green glow, brightening again, coalesced into a spiral, opened out into a series of circles like wavering smoke rings, and then slowly solidified into shimmering pillars. Deep purple and red crept out from behind the green and made vertical stripes alongside it.

Looking up, Aziraphale breathed an audible “ooohhhh.”

Beside him, Crowley tried pulling his black wool morning coat closer around himself, flipping up the lapels to cross over in the front. Since it wasn’t actually a coat, or actually wool, or actually clothing, it didn’t make him any warmer. 

“Goodness,” sighed Aziraphale, as the vertical stripes tilted toward them and turned into cascading streaks of indigo, chasing each other upward into the sky.

Crowley’s legs didn’t seem to be working the way they were supposed to. He focused on lifting his left foot. It ignored him. 

The demon stumbled. 

Aziraphale laughed. “Dangerous to be looking up all the time, isn’t it. I should watch where I’m going, too, or—” 

He turned to look at Crowley and stopped laughing. “Oh dear.” He reached down to offer a hand and help him up again. 

Crowley accepted the help, because the alternative seemed to be to stay there, sitting on his backside in the road. Being a demon wasn’t very dignified to start with. He hated when anything happened to make it worse. 

He would have grabbed Aziraphale’s hand, but his fingers wouldn’t close.

Aziraphale pulled him up by the wrist instead, then shifted under Crowley’s arm to support his taller form. 

“What’s the matter?”

“Cold,” Crowley managed, the word slow and drawn-out. His thoughts, also creaky and sluggish, felt like they were caked in snow. 

This had never happened to him before. Not that he hadn’t been out in the cold. Medieval armor felt extra heavy on a damp winter morning in the north of England. He’d been caught in the snow more than once in London. But usually there was an omnibus to jump onto, or a nice pub to duck into, or he’d manifest himself for a few minutes in someone else’s carriage just long enough to warm up—and, because it amused him, would take on his demon form so he could watch their faces when they caught sight of him in one of the passenger seats.2

“Maybe I should miracle us out of here.”

Crowley knew that tone. Of course the Angel _could_ miracle them out of there, back to London if he wanted to, or to a nice restaurant in Paris, or to a tropical island somewhere where the sun would be so warm that those sweet drinks with the fruit in them actually made sense. 

Would he though? That was another story. Aziraphale was on thin ice right now with the Powers That Be. He’d done a few too many extras lately, and some of them hadn’t gone according to Plan. But then, as Aziraphale had explained to Crowley a few days ago, over a shared bottle of wine in the comfortable back room of that century’s incarnation of the bookshop, how was he supposed to know Who shall have rest and Who shall wander? 

If Michael wanted him to keep track of Who shall become rich and Who shall be impoverished, maybe the Archangel ought to provide a running list. It wasn’t _reasonable_ to expect him to guess.

But oh, no, give one deserving urchin a long-lost uncle who dies and leaves him a fortune, and you’ve got the Wrath of Heaven raining down on you.

Well, as Aziraphale had told Crowley, halfway into their second bottle of wine, he wasn’t sorry. 

He was, however, having to be extra careful for a while. Which meant that, unless he was willing to face some divine punishment (which would be very far from divine), he needed to do things properly for a while.

Mistaking a tiny village in Iceland for a major center of the Norwegian herring fishery was not doing things properly. 

Popping over to Norway direct from Iceland, where he had no reason to be except his own incompetence, was the sort of thing that might be noticed. 

“No miracles,” Crowley managed, through lips that would barely make the words. 

“No?” Aziraphale’s tone had that waver in it that said he honestly wasn’t certain what to do here.

“No.” Crowley would be ok. He just needed to get somewhere warm.

 

They’d arrived in Iceland by steamship. That had been Crowley’s idea, to travel by human means and give Heaven the slip for a while. Hell didn’t care: Crowley had cheerfully claimed credit for the Industrial Revolution and was now enjoying a bit of a sabbatical.

In fact the whole thing about him tagging along to Iceland was Crowley’s idea. Or at least, he thought it was. 

Aziraphale had mentioned it first, it being his assignment. The topic had floated up near the bottom of that second bottle of wine, or possibly it was the third. “I’ve got to go to Iceland,” the Angel said. “I’ve never been to Iceland.” He set his glass down carefully next to a hand-painted map with curled corners. He tapped at the map with an index finger, very nearly not missing the roundish island in the North Atlantic. “I’ll bet _you’ve_ never been to Iceland.”

Crowley did not particularly care whether he ever got to Iceland. Not enough people there, not enough opportunity for corruption. Iceland was not, so to speak, on his radar.3 “I have,” he acknowledged, “never been to Iceland.”

“Nobody has,” slurred Aziraphale, reaching for his glass again. “I looked it up. Not your lot, not mine. I am,” he said morosely, “going to be the first harbinger of— the first harbinger of—“ Crowley caught the glass and took it from the Angel’s hand, before Aziraphale’s waving it around led to wine sloshing everywhere. “Of whatever.”

Aziraphale was not normally a sloppy drunk. He might get _intellectually_ sloppy when more than a little sozzled, in the way of forgetting which book of the New Testament had the table flipping thing. Although, who could keep those books straight anyway. But he’d never risk red wine staining his favorite ivory jacket.

Crowley looked at him closely, as closely as he could though eyes that weren’t quite focusing. Aziraphale had that wrinkle in his forehead. Something about Iceland, or the thing he had to do in Iceland, or something tangentially related but that had the word Iceland associated with it, was worrying him. 

Crowley could have cleared the alcohol from his human-shaped body with a thought. Instead, he left it there and said, “Let’s _both_ go to Iceland.”

“I can’t let you come to Iceland. It’s never been—” Aziraphale waved his hand again, this time without the wine glass in it. “It’s never been—Your thing.” He sat up straighter. “It is virgin to the influence of Hell.”

“Is it?” Crowley leaned back in his chair, downed the last swallow of his wine. “Sounds boring. I better come with you, liven things up a bit.”

“You can’t,” Aziraphale said. “I won’t let you.”

“We’ve been through this,” Crowley reminded him. “Forces of good, forces of evil. Got to have both for the free will whatnot. Otherwise it’s just you running around influencing things.” 

Ten minutes later, and they’d been through it all again: free will, decisions requiring opposing forces, can’t claim to be righteous if you have an angel on one shoulder but no devil on the other.

“Oh fine.” Aziraphale said testily, but Crowley noticed that the worry lines on his forehead had gone. The angel picked up the map. He held it out to the demon. “Steamship or sail?”

 

The aurora borealis cavorted overhead. It made undulating ribbons. It made twisted ropey patterns. It made a sheer, pale green fog that lit the whole sky.

Beneath it, an angel’s strength was coming in handy to help get a demon the last 2 miles back to Dalvik. 

The question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin has been addressed, quite thoroughly, in another story of Aziraphale and Crowley. The question of how much an angel can bench press, however, has received less attention across the centuries. This may be because, although men have demonstrated their manliness since time immemorial by picking up heavy things, the hobby of lifting weights repeatedly just to keep putting them back down again is a relatively new invention.

In truth, the weightlifting ability of angels has never been fully tested. It only took two angels to take down Sodom and Gomorrah, but that was more fire and brimstone. There is also the smiting. Historically, angels have done a lot of smiting. There’s no denying that takes strength, but what angels do is really about capacity. One angry human can smite another angry human very effectively with normal human strength. Angels just have this ability to do it to a few thousand humans all at the same time. 

There was that whole moving the rock away from Jesus’ tomb thing. That was probably pretty heavy. But in all the years of biblical history, angels haven’t done a lot of lifting stuff.

Another thing that isn’t talked about very much is the weight of a demon. Guilt is certainly heavy, and preachers like to go on about the weight of sin. But in all the millennia both before and after Creation, it has never occurred to any of Satan’s minions to climb onto a scale.

Luckily, the weight of one half-frozen demon turned out to be somewhat less than that of the rock in front of Jesus’ tomb.

In fact, Aziraphale found that letting Crowley lean on him wasn’t difficult at all.

“I could carry you,” he offered at one point. “We’d go faster.”

“’S embarrassing enough, Angel.” Crowley’s words were quiet as the empty road and brittle as the ice crystals under his stumbling feet. “Walk.”

 

Dalvik, today, is home to about 1,400 people. Among other attractions, there is the Dalvik Swimming Pool complex. Had they arrived earlier in the evening, and in 2019 instead of 1852, Crowley could have warmed up in a comfortable hot tub with a marvelous view of the northern lights doing their thing. He could even have gone down the slide, when he was feeling a little more himself again. 

Although, once he was feeling himself again, it was highly unlikely he would be going down slides at swimming pools. After all, someone might see him. It didn’t go with the image. That was more the angel’s sort of thing.

Dalvik, in the 1850s, was a smattering of wood-frame houses clustered near the sea and a handful of farmhouses, some with turf roofs, scattered throughout surrounding fields.

Dalvik also had a guesthouse. It had been offered to them when they arrived, but they’d not been expecting to need it. Now, they found the door ajar and the single room empty. Aziraphale hefted Crowley up the few steps and through the door.

The little house had just one room. A bit of pale starlight came through a small, glass-paned window. Beyond the window, the green glow of the aurora continued to dance in the sky.

An angel’s eyes don’t need much light to see. There was a hearth against one wall, with a small pile of driftwood set neatly beside an an iron grate. Two simple wooden chairs were pulled up to a sturdy-looking table. A nice iron bed frame was made up with a feather mattress, white sheets, and a simple quilt. Clearly, there was trade between this place and the angel’s more familiar haunts. It could have been a room in any simple inn along a road in England. 

Although we don’t exactly know an angel’s strength, it clearly is the strength of many. Which is why it took Aziraphale a minute or two of admiring this simple little room before he recalled he had a demon leaning on his shoulder. 

“Right,” he said to himself, observing that Crowley’s tall form was no longer moving at all. “First thing, get some heat in here.”

A demon who is so chilled he’s lost the power of speech isn’t going to complain. Aziraphale did pause for a second—Crowley had said he didn’t want to be carried, after all. Then he hefted the demon up over one shoulder, carted him to the bed, pulled back the covers, and tucked him in.

It took only a few minutes to get a fire going. Angels don’t need fireplaces, or central heating for that matter, but Aziraphale had always liked a cheery blaze. He stacked some of the driftwood on the grate, found a little pile of dried moss beside it, and arranged some of that under the wood in lieu of kindling. He checked to see if there was a chimney flue to open. He considered whether the small box of “Lucifer” matches might be a message, decided they weren’t, and went ahead and struck one. 

“There,” he said, looking at the fire but talking to Crowley, as yellow flames leapt up. “We’ll have you right in no time.”

The little fire crackled. 

Was it getting any warmer? Aziraphale had to think about it, because, remember, angels don’t get cold. They don’t notice temperature much at all. They can bring about violent rainstorms, chill wind and icy rain, and be right out in the middle of it without their teeth even chattering. They can travel from a London winter to an Australian summer and neither shiver nor break a sweat. It’s one of the few ways you can tell you’re looking at an angel, actually: everyone else will be in shirtsleeves, fanning themselves, and Aziraphale will be strolling along, waistcoat buttoned and favorite jacket on, as if it’s a crisp fall day. 

He looked over to Crowley, who hadn’t moved at all.

Aziraphale sat down beside him, his weight shifting the feather tick just enough that Crowley opened his eyes.

“Dammit,” the demon managed. 

“Well, no,” Aziraphale said. “I expect it’s just a temporary thing. It was very cold out there, and you were a snake for a while, after all. Cold-blooded,” he added, to make it clear he wasn’t criticizing. Nothing wrong with shifting forms, if you wanted to.

He sat there, upright on the edge of the bed, while the little fire tried valiantly to warm the room. He went over and added some more driftwood, then returned to the same spot. 

Crowley grumbled something.

Aziraphale leaned over to hear him better. “Say that again?”

“Quit hovering.”

“Oh. Right, of course.” Aziraphale bounced once or twice on the edge of the mattress, wondering what to do instead of sitting there.

Crowley was obviously still freezing, while Aziraphale was, as always, perfectly toasty. He noticed, as he worried, that he was wringing his hands together. In spite of the chilled air, the angel’s fingers and palms were warm.

Warm. Oh!

Aziraphale rose briskly and strode across the room to the table. He unbuttoned his coat carefully, took it off, brushed the wrinkles smooth with one hand, and hung it on the back of a chair. His waistcoat followed. He left his shoes lined up neatly together and padded back to the bed in his socks.

Crowley’s yellow eyes followed him as he pulled aside the blankets and climbed beneath them.

Aziraphale wasn’t sure if the shiver that went through his own self—through the flesh he wore, that is—was from the icy cold of Crowley’s body, or from the shock of the ineffable lying so close to the damned. He worked an arm beneath the demon’s back, then tugged him over so the auburn head rested against his own chest. For a being that looked lanky, even scrawny, Crowley actually had quite broad shoulders. His arms and legs were stiff and unbending. Aziraphale stretched his own arms around him as best he could and held him tight.

At first, nothing happened.

Then, gradually, the demon’s limbs began to soften. One leg shifted to lie closer against Aziraphale’s. The fingers of one hand moved, bending into a fist and then opening again to rest flat against Aziraphale’s ribs. Or, anyhow, the ribs of the body he was wearing.

Crowley’s elbows bent, shoulders shifted, arms snaked around Aziraphale until he was, for all intents and purposes, returning the angel’s hug. “Better,” he sighed, cheek pressed against the soft cotton of Aziraphale’s shirt.

“Oh good,” said Aziraphale. 

They stayed that way a while.

They stayed that way a good long while.

They stayed that way while the lights of the aurora faded and the fire burned down to a red glow.

Finally, Aziraphale couldn’t take it anymore. He had to say something. “Are you all warmed up?”

“Mm,” said Crowley, not moving.

“All right. I’ll be getting up then.” He reached for the blanket.

Crowley’s arms tightened. “Why?” 

“This is a thing that humans do,” Aziraphale said. “I’m not sure that an angel and a demon should—”

“Why not?”

“Well, it isn’t— I mean, we aren’t—”

Crowley lifted his head. Yellow eyes fixed on Aziraphale’s. “Do you want to?”

“What I want isn’t—”

“You are an ethereal being with all the knowledge of the universe,” Crowley said. “Why do you have a bookshop?” 

“Well, not _all_ the knowledge, really.”

“Why?” 

“Because I like it, I suppose.”

“You don’t need to eat. Why do you get those cream pastries from the bakery down the street?”

“I know what you’re doing, Crowley. It’s not going to work.” Aziraphale’s tone was prim. But he left the covers where they were. He smoothed the edge of the blanket down over Crowley’s shoulder. He rested a hand on Crowley’s head and turned an auburn curl around one finger. The angel sighed. “I do like a good pastry,” he said.

But now Crowley was sitting up, untangling himself from the angel’s body. 

Oh, thought Aziraphale. It was a trick, wasn’t it. One of those temptation things, after all.

The demon sat facing him. Crowley’s hair was a bit on end, but his jacket, since it wasn’t actually a jacket, was uncreased, the lapels lying neatly and the shirt collar crisp and flat. “Shift over,” he said.

Aziraphale moved uncertainly, edging toward the side of the bed. Crowley reached for him, pulling him into his arms, so that now it was Aziraphale wrapped up against Crowley’s body, Crowley’s hand tucking the angel’s head against his shoulder. 

The last few coals of the fire glowed quietly. Outside, the aurora borealis had settled down for the night. Stars twinkled in the firmament. A whale spout shone silver in the starlight.

“Thank you, Angel,” Crowley said, surprising Aziraphale with the words. He ran one long, cool finger across the worry line that had crept back onto Aziraphale’s forehead, and added, “We’ll figure out how to get to Norway tomorrow.”

 

FOOTNOTES  
1\. Only much later had it occurred to the shopkeeper to wonder why he’d given some random bloke half his stock of wool socks in exchange for a toothy smile and the word “Cheers!”  
2\. If he’d realized how often it gave them nightmares, he might have refrained from the demonic manifestation part. But he had no frame of reference for that, having never had a nightmare himself. Then again, the pits of hell, for which he did have all too much of a frame of reference, were more nightmarish than most humans’ nightmares, and he’d gotten so used to them it hardly bothered him anymore. So maybe he would have done it anyway.  
3\. Not that it would have been. Radar was not going to be invented until 1935.


End file.
